What do we know today that we didn't know on Monday? Don't let Sir Jony Ive anywhere near your icons. Ive may be the world's most famous industrial designer, but his first attempt at creating a new look for iOS 7 has attracted confusion and mirth in equal quantities.
Here's some of the brilliance that inspired the sniggering …

made-up icons

Out of those 4 icons at the top of the article, 2 don't actually exist anywhere in the beta. Where did they come from, and why are people complaining when they don't exist?

The rest: i very much suspect it's going to get more polish before it's launched. There's a lot that's obviously missing in beta 1, and some of the icons look very much like a 1st draft.

Also, if you spend some time with the beta, what gets you isn't the bright colours (which are actually pretty OK in use), it's the large amount of flat grey that appears everywhere. It's a horrible wash of light grey wherever you use a folder.

I just saw some more iOS7 screen shots... and aside from the ghastly icons, I like the way they are flattering Microsoft, the new app switching, other than the upward swipe now bares an uncanny resemblance to the app switching in Win Pho8....

I must be honest and I do like the look of the paralaxing backgrounds... those are quite cool, but I guess wont be available on pre 4s devices....

Really?

I think you shrilling for MS is reaching here. Who the hell would copy a failed OS?

MS have generated mirth by creating a grey-on-grey design (particularly in office) that has been widely derided as unusable drivel. Apple might have run out of ideas around the time that jobs popped his clogs, but at least they recognise that splashing some colour across the copying of Android functionality will make it slightly less obviously that they are now in 'slow follower' /'cash cow' mode.

Oh, and BTW, changing the background colour on widgets and icons doesn't make it a new UI idea - it just makes it look fisher-price. Who know, maybe in a few years time MS can rediscover overlapping windows....

Re: Really?

just an observation... you may call winpho8 outdated, but when you switch apps, the screens shrink, you then swipe side to side to select the app you want... much the same as the new app switching in iOS7...

and standing up for one of the new iOS7 features, insignificant as it may be - the tilty parallax backgrounds is possibly the opposite of being an MS Shill

Re: Really?

There seems to be confusion

Over the difference between designing icons and designing how a UI works. As iOS 7 is still beta then I expect that things like icons are still subject to change (which is the easy job). How the UI works seems to be rather less well considered by the likes of Mr Orlowski. I'm going to hold off commenting on it until I've actually had chance to use it and decide for myself whether or not it's a step in the right direction.

So it was Jony Ive all along...

Having played with the beta, and as both a user of the iPhone since the first UK release and an ex-UI designer, I can honestly say that this is the best iOS has looked and worked, with one notable exception. The apps all look great; the removal of skeumorphism is long overdue and results in a much cleaner UI. The core changes to iOS like the Control Center are very useful.

But the big problem is the design of the icons. I sincerely hope that the icons in the beta are placeholders for final designs, because they spoil the whole appearance of the home screen.

It's not really the colour palette that's the problem; it's more that there is no consistent style to them. Some look like simplified versions of the originals; some look whimsical (Game Center); some are unnecessarily detailed (Compass, Stocks) - they don't all look as if they belong together on the same device. The big worry is that getting a nice consistent look to the icons is such a fundamental step in a redesign like this that if it hasn't already happened, I fear it may never do so, and releasing the OS with this icon set would be a huge mistake.

Looking at the screenshots here, most things look clean and simple - it is only that Home Screen with its dodgy icons and unhelpful wallpaper - that look bad. The 'control centre' doesn't look too bad, but since it is translucent it is showing the garish faults of the homescreen that sit 'behind' it. I like the way it has four shortcuts to applications other than those that sit at the bottom of the homescreen.

However, there's nothing there to make me switch from Android (though 3rd party hardware accessories and apps might tempt me)

The screenshots of many of the applications remind me, aesthetically, of the UI on the iRiver Spinn: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2008/09/iriver-spinn-official.jpg

(the irony is, the Spinn UI looks 'Flat', yet is skeumorphic in that it resembles the dial of an FM radio)

Re: The UI is a bit .. y'know ... camp

Re: The UI is a bit .. y'know ... camp

>ahem married...

Well, yes, we can say "married". Some members of the design team might well be. Currently, we can talk about almost any pair of adults living in California as, potentially, being married... Next month? Depends on what the SCOTUS has to say on the challenge of the constitutionality of Proposition

Wait, wait... Oh, I geddit: you're making an allusion to ... y'know ... sexuality and associated stereotypes--semi-obliquely, by way of reference to marriage, and the apparently unmentionable fact that these things are "Designed... in California". Tsk tsk!

Re: The UI is a bit .. y'know ... camp

Really?

If it was all brushed chrome and steel type textures and colours then that might well be a cue that the designer might have been a gay man. Don't know of any gay men who are "gay" when it comes to colour choices.

Obey$DIR

People forget: Icons should be iconic!

One thing I think a lot of people who try to design user interfaces forget is that icons should be iconic - what they represent should be so immediately obvious that they need no explanation. If you have to put a tool-tip on an icon so people know what it is, you have failed.

The problem is that designers try to use icons to save screen real estate, and so we get the sort of "mystery meat" icons that you see in the picture, because there's only so much you can express in that small a picture, and not every concept has a sufficiently iconic representation.

Re: People forget: Icons should be iconic!

Everyone has to learn what an icon means; a 3.5" floppy disk means little to anyone under 20, yet people have learned that that's the button to click on to save, so even the most common ones require memorising.

Ask anyone who's done the UI for business software or anything complex. It's quite hard, if not impossible, to represent all concepts and tasks in a tiny square image.

Re: People forget: Icons should be iconic!

In a touch UI aren't the icons at least partly there to provide a bigger 'thing' to prod with a finger? So to some extent being easily distiguishable from each other is as important, as people will soon learn what their function is?

Re: People forget: Icons should be iconic!

"what they represent should be so immediately obvious that they need no explanation"

Agreed. I like the (now derided) skeuomorphism in the iOS5/6 icons. Having said that I've never understood why the Safari icon depicted a compass overlaid on a map of the world when I'm not actually travelling anywhere.

Re: People forget: Icons should be iconic!

"I've never understood why the Safari icon depicted a compass overlaid on a map of the world when I'm not actually travelling anywhere."

... And then when Nokia used a simplified compass icon for their Map application ( http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hLiYEZf4Ox0/TxhqHECjLwI/AAAAAAAAA4g/OOwlwtwg5X0/s1600/maps+icon.JPG ), one of the Tech Blog Superstars™ claimed that it was a bizarre and confusing choice, as a compass should mean "the web browser". (This despite Apple using the compass motif twice in the same context for two different functions: web and, er, compass)

Personally, I have always hated the use of the 3.5" floppy icon for "Save" (it's not as egregious as "Yes/No dialogs", but it's in the same list). It's confusing because in an interface, the icons are objects, and thus nouns; an object cannot be a verb. As soon as you start trying to convey an action using a static object you're distracting the user with stupid rebus puzzles.